New MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch with M2 Pro and M2 Max tout Apple's longest Mac battery life
New Mac Mini gets outfitted with M2 and M2 Pro with all deliveries starting January 24
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: New Macs
🍎 Apple announced its first products of 2023 – surprise, it’s new Macs
💻 MacBook Pro 14 & 16-inch get M2 Pro / M2 Max chips and WiFi 6E
🖥️ Mac Mini gets M2 and M2 Pro chip upgrade
💪 Apple touts up to 6x faster performance, 2x faster color grading
🔋 Apple claims the longest battery life in a Mac – up to 22 hours
📆 Release date: Tues, February 24 (custom orders seem to go out Feb 26)
We’re 17 days into the new year and Apple just announced its first products of 2023: new MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. The designs of each reflect what we got the last generation down to the colors (no MacBook Pro in Midnight, sorry), but this time Apple includes its latest chipsets.
MacBook Pro 2023 price and specs
The MacBook Pro 14-inch price starts at $1,999 and the base level 16-inch version is $2,499. You can bring the 16-inch price all of the way up to $6,499 if you outfit it with the M2 Max’s 12‑core CPU, 38‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine, and max out the memory and SSD to 96GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage.
The official release date for both sizes is Tuesday, February 24, however, I found that if you do change the configuration on any of the new MacBooks (meaning if you upgrade the storage, RAM or CPU from the three default options), the delivery date slips to February 26.
The new chips – Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max – are the stars of the show, with the company touting up to 6x faster performance and 2x faster color grading if you’re upgrading from an Intel-based MacBook Pro. Apple says “creators can work on scenes so large, PC laptops can’t even run them.”
For more frequent MacBook Pro upgrades (those who bought into the M1 Pro), Apple does offer some insight into how the new MacBook Pro 2023 compares against its own chipsets, highlighting 20% greater performance over the last-gen M1 Pro. It also states that the MacBook Pro 2023 offers 200GB/s unified memory bandwidth – double the amount in MacBook Air’s M2 – and up to 32GB of unified memory.
I recommend upgrading the CPU and RAM as much as your budget allows, as you can always offload files to an external SSD. You can’t really get faster performance from the processor and memory after the fact.
Not everyone needs 96GB of unified memory in a MacBook Pro, of course, but that’s the one we’re going to test along with Apple’s M2 Max chipset.
Mac Mini 2023 price and specs
The Mac Mini – which debuted with the M1 a little over two years ago – gets the M2 and M2 Pro treatment starting at $599 an 8-core CPU today.
Maxing out the CPU and RAM – but leaving the SSD at 512GB if you dare – offers a chance to play with a 10-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine plus 32GB of unified memory at $1,999, so you’ll be paying three times the price.
The Mac Studio, introduced last year, remains on the last-generation Apple Silicon (but far more powerful chip) M1 Max and Max 1 Ultra starting at $1,999 for those who want to go bigger in all ways on a desktop-class Mac. The MacBook Air M2, also from last year, remains unchanged in price and specs if you can’t quite budget a brand new MacBook Pro 2013.